Alan Williamson - CV

This is the longer version of my About page: the roles, the work and the record behind it.

Highlighted Roles

• Co-founder, ThinkLikeACTO.ai: AI readiness assessments, leadership foundations, dev team enablement and product integration, with Ryan Burch.

• CTO, HiBid: the world's second largest auction platform behind eBay. Led a complete reimagining of the core platform.

• Principal, ParkerGale: ran TechOps across a growing portfolio of PE-backed companies.

• Operating Partner, New Harbor Capital.

• Co-founder, MacLaurin Group.

• Editor-in-Chief, Java Developer's Journal (SYS-CON Media).

• Adjunct Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Selected engagements

Rebuilding a 100+ person engineering team

At one portfolio company I spent two years going back and forth to India, embedding myself inside a 100+ person engineering team that had lost its focus. Adding more people had been the answer to every problem, and it had made everything worse. I got to know the team personally, elevated the people who could lead, invested in those who were teachable, and made the hard calls on those who were not the right fit. The team came out smaller, sharper, and actually delivering.

Replacing an in-house EHR

I migrated an in-house electronic health record system to a commercial solution, removing $1.2 million in annual costs and freeing the business to focus on what it was built to do.

On-premise to cloud-native

Across multiple engagements I have taken businesses from on-premise to cloud-native, redesigning architectures to be properly scalable, serverless where it makes sense, and built to grow without the engineering team becoming the bottleneck.

Reimagining HiBid

As CTO at HiBid I led a complete reimagining of the core platform behind the world's second largest auction site.

AI work

I have built AI end to end. I have built agentic AI workflows that generate production-ready code, stood up an AI image analysis pipeline that processes millions of images a day for identification, and led the build of a full ERP system powered largely by autonomous AI agents.

Beyond that, I built an AI image and video studio for product editing at e-commerce scale, a document AI pipeline that processes invoices and purchase orders for a financial services client, and an agent assistant for patient care in healthcare. Some of this runs on infrastructure the client controls rather than a vendor's cloud. I have set up local LLM serving for sensitive data, and local model serving for text-to-speech generation agents.

I have built MCP servers that give businesses fast, structured access to their own data and systems, including a secure MCP server for data-warehouse access, across multiple clients including HiBid. Most businesses are sitting on information they cannot easily get to. MCP changes that quickly.

Gearing up development teams matters as much as the technology. I ran AI enablement for two cohorts of 30 engineers and published the internal guidelines they now use for day-to-day delivery, then embedded AI capabilities directly into the product for customers and rolled it out across business operations.

Technical due diligence

I carry out deep technical assessments for PE firms evaluating acquisitions. Good diligence does not just flag problems. It tells you whether those problems are fixable within your thesis, or whether the gap between what the technology is and what it needs to become is a reason to walk away.

Open source

I was the core architect behind BlueDragon/OpenBD, a Java JEE engine that supports and renders the Allaire/Adobe CFML web scripting language. Built from the ground up, BlueDragon went on to power the largest CFML website in the world, MySpace.com, when it was the fifth largest website in the world.

The project was later ported to Microsoft's .NET platform, offering the only .NET implementation of CFML and powering many US state government sites. In later years the code was released under the GPL open source license.

I have also contributed code and patches to many open source projects, including jQuery, Apache Commons, the Mongo Java driver, Jetty, JavaMail and the core Java SDK.

Publications

• Think Like a CTO: Manning, 2023. Amazon best seller, translated into Russian and Japanese.

• JavaMail Handbook: Wrox, 2003.

• ANT Developer's Handbook: SAMS, 2002.

• Java Server Programming: Wrox, 2002.

• Java Servlets: By Example: Manning, 1999.

• Java: JDBC & Servlets: Prentice Hall, 1998.

• Java Developer's Journal: Editor-in-Chief, SYS-CON Media, 1999 to 2004.

Teaching and speaking

I was an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I designed, delivered, mentored and examined Object Design and Algorithms for a class of 60 students. I also taught an MBA class on Cloud Computing at the University of Richmond.

I have spoken at over 30 conferences around the world, on topics ranging from deep Java technical sessions to open source licensing, big data, cloud and IoT, and most recently on serverless at the jChampions Conference.

Podcasts

Appearances include AWS, Modern CTO, Private Equity Funcast, HockeyStick, University of Paisley, Rob Liddiard and Techlead Journal.

Education and recognition

• BSc (Hons) Computer Science, University of Paisley.

• First UK Java Champion, an Oracle program recognizing the top 100 contributors to the Java ecosystem worldwide.

Work with me

If any of this sounds like what your business needs, talk to us at ThinkLikeACTO.ai.